The frog is a powerful and widespread symbol of intoxication in numerous native societies in South America.

The crystallized venom of Cobras is often mixed with cannabis and then smoked by Holy Men in India.

After killing a giraffe the hunters make camp and prepare a drink called umm nyolokh from its liver and bone marrow.
The hunters say that the making of this drink is the main reason for hunting the giraffe.
\"it is said that a person, once he has drunk umm nyolokh, will return to giraffe again and again\"
Humr, being Mahdists, are strict abstainers and a Humrawi is never drunk (sakran) on liquor or beer. But he uses this word to describe the effects which umm nyolokh has upon him.\'
After drinking it, dreams of giraffes are commonly reported and Cunnison said that he actually heard a man wake up shortly after drinking it shouting \'giraffe on your left\'. Waking hallucinations experienced under the influence of the drink also typically involve giraffes.

Stories of psychotropic birds are extremely rare. A sixteenth century account of the Aztecs by Diego Munoz Camargo describes how eating the flesh of the bird named oconenetl induces visions. It is not known to which kind of bird this refers, beyond the description of it as being fed and black.
It is possible that either the bird itself produced a psychoactive substance or it ingested the drug from a plant source.
Batrachotoxins (i.e. amphibian poisons) have been recently discovered in the feathers and skin of South American birds of the genus Pitohui Richard Schultes has reported that the bones of a certain bird that ate the fruits of a plant that was used as an additive to ayahuasca were known to be poisonous to dogs.

The Amahuaca people of the Peruvian Amazon are reported to use the poison from a frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) to induce states of trance. The poison is rubbed into self-inflicted burns and believed to allow the hunters to communicate with animal spirits.

Ratsch has suggested that the yellow stingray (Urolophus jamaicensis) was used for its inebriating and aphrodisiac venom in pre-Columbian times by the Maya.

A nineteenth-century French explorer named Augustin de Saint-Hilaire (1779—1853) has left behind descriptions of the use of bicho de tacuara, a \'bamboo grub\' (which seems actually to be the larva of a certain type of moth) by the Malalis, an indigenous people of eastern Brazil, and some Portuguese residents who had \'gone native\'.

Hunting a giraffe is COMPLETELY different. You kill the giraffe. It's dead. You eat it, and the liver and bones are psychoactive. But if you're out killing giraffes well you probably need to be out hunting something, so its fine by me.

The bear bile thing is disgusting because they cage and tap their bile, without killing the animal. It's a horrible practice and I've been supporting charities to stop this shit for about 15 years now. Don't compare it to hunting animals for food though. That would be the stupid hippy point of view.

Maybe so, but it doesn't seem that this thread is about hunting animals for their culinary attributes; more like their psychoactivity.

Yeah, but I don't think anyone here is going to go out giraffe hunting tomorrow. They aren't just wandering around on all the continents. Also, if you take into consideration how much bone and liver a giraffe has, I'm guessing one has quite a few doses. Not to mention how difficult it actually is to go out and find a giraffe, kill it, skin it, cut it up etc. It's a HUGE animal. The logistics of hunting it purely for its psychoactive ability is just silly. It's not worth the amount of energy it would take unless you ate the meat for sustenance as well. This is assuming that you are needing to hunt etc. Not some idiot person going giraffe hunting for kicks with a big gun and a chainsaw. But I doubt you would when you can access other psychoactives without THAT much effort.

As for the rest of them. Most of the reptiles are probably milked for their psychoactives, not killed. The fish well, if you manage to catch one good on ya. The insects, as long as they aren't endangered I don't really care that much, they reproduce en masse to be cannon fodder for plenty of things, why not humans.

And the psychoactive bird? Well we aren't even sure what that is.

All in all I think its just interesting information. I highly doubt anyone acting on it.

Although now that I consider it, it would be awesome if you could pay to go giraffe hunting just once in your life to do that, with a bunch of close friends. I imagine the ritual would be quite something. Sounds like a fun thing to try. (I have no problem with hunting as long as its done in a way that is not torturing the animal and not endangering anything, or reckless)

Giraffe farm anyone?

I imagine the experience would increase ones respect for giraffes and animals in general, rather than lower it.

Yeah I respect that. I wouldn't support anything that would harm a species overall, or cause undue harm on an animal for no good reason though. To be honest I'm getting close to being vegetarian these days. Hunting feels like the meat is a reward for your massive physical effort to me though, I can't think of anything more natural for a human to be doing than out hunting for their own food. Instead of going to the supermarket and buying precut steaks with no concept of how that animal lived, died or where it came from. I think a lot of kids don't even have any real concept that the meat is from a living, breathing animal, which makes it hard to have any respect for them.

Ethics of hunting aside, the quote in the OP seems to indicate they hunt giraffe specifically *for* the psychoactive effect and that those why try it are compelled to hunt more and more of them. Sounds to me sort of like superstitions about ivory leading to overhunting of elephants. At any rate, I am highly skeptical that there is actually a significant psychoactive in giraffe bones. There are MANY recorded traditional rituals that are associated with altered states of consciousness but don't actually involve entheogen use. Think of all the random inactive plants that are included in some ayahuasca recipes because the shamans producing them had no idea what MAOIs and DMT were and just had some vague notion of altering the spirit or personality of the brew.

Don't necessarily disagree, but hunting a giraffe is not going to be as easy as collecting some plants. Ivory hunting is different. It was done with guns by people looking to profit. I doubt anybody is going to profit from killing giraffes and selling their livers and bones as psychoactives, given how many easy to obtain psychoactive substances exist in modern society. Ivory on the other hand is a one off kind of thing. Walrus, elephants... what else?

Who cares how difficult it is? My point is simply that a cultural superstition attaching value to an animal part beyond its actual properties is probably a bad thing because, in the case of elephants at least, it nearly led to their extinction. Sure, the problem is much _worse_ because Westerners buy the ivory, creating a larger market, but I still don't think we should be glorifying or romanticising this kind of nonsense.

Of course, if we ever do discover an active compound in giraffe bones, that's another great argument for the value of synthetics: we could find a synthetic route to produce the same compound, thus eliminating the need to kill giraffes.

I think if people are genuinely concerned about animals our first port of call needs to be the extreme amount of habitat destruction we've caused. It's hard to save species when you've destroyed where they've been living for millions of years.

If people are genuinely concerned about environmental destruction in general, there is only one option: the complete abolition of capitalism. My favorite quote on the matter comes from Murray Bookchin: “[c]apitalism not only validates precapitalist notions of the domination of nature, . . . it turns the plunder of nature into society's law of life. To quibble with this kind of system about its values, to try to frighten it with visions about the consequences of growth is to quarrel with its very metabolism. One might more easily persuade a green plant to desist from photosynthesis than to ask the bourgeois economy to desist from capital accumulation.”

Post the actual content with a source (like the giraffe quotes) and leave off the douchey pedantic list of plant/animal/chemical names next time and you'll get a slightly better response. Or better yet, join in someone ELSE'S conversation instead of starting a new thread every 10 minutes.